What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all

October 23, 2012
Robert X. Cringely

At this point a longtime reader of this column speaks up:

“I have been a practicing immigration attorney for over 13 years. I have done many H-1B visas and like any other government program it was loaded and is still loaded with abuses… In my opinion, employers who need H-1B Visa workers should have to go through a screening process before they are allowed to submit the application and a bond should be posted if they violate the law.

“For a large multinational corporation to play this game is not new. The reason that they carry on with these activities are for one reason only — control. Control of the employee and uneven bargaining at the end of the day. I have dealt with this with different multinational corporations… and they have, can and will act in the same manner. As always, it takes either an investigation by the USDOJ or massive fines (or both) to redirect bad behavior to federal compliance.”

“Even if I wasn’t at ground zero in this stuff, it would still bother me,” wrote another longtime reader who has spent his entire career in IT. “Our country spent decades learning to treat workers fairly and with respect. The driving force behind unions in the first place was to address serious problems in the workplace. With all this offshoring and H-1B crap, we’ve dumped 100 years of improving society down the drain. Maybe USA workers do cost too much. The problem is we are not fixing the actual problem. As more and more jobs go off shore, the damage to our economy grows. If we would fix the problems the playing field would be more level and USA workers could compete for jobs. These abuses by corporations are not only hurting USA workers, they are hurting our nation.”

In addition, another 178K+ work visas were issued to: chileans & singaporeans with special skills (h1b1); nurses (h1c); seasonal agricultural workers (h2a); temporary workers (h2b); 'trainees' (h3); and employees of international companies (spouses are allowed to work as well) (l1).

www.travel.state.gov/pdf/FY2010NIVWorkloadbyVisaCategory.pdf

That's about 1/4 million A YEAR, and i haven't even exhausted all the categories of work visas.

7. H1B, L1, OPT, B1, and others

As this article discusses, a study by the GAO was performed for the Congress in 2011. The study concluded that only 6.0% of the recipients of the H-1B visa were "Fully Competent" and that a staggering 54% of the visa recipients were "Entry Level" workers.

Obviously, these workers are being trained, and sometimes by the very US STEM worker that is being replaced. Instead of training foreign, submissive, third world workers, US workers could be trained, both young and old. Young college grads could be trained and older workers needing to have their skills updated could be trained.

But corporate America has more leverage on third world visa holders. So the corporate leaders like Bill Gates manipulate the system to get visas for highly skilled workers, but then they use the visas to hire entry level workers.

5. 5th rec. They are hurting us and have been for well over a decade and for no purpose other

than to help billionaires steal even more from us.

I remember seeing the same asshole at the same table telling the same lies even as the technology boom was still in its infancy. They were abusing the temp worker system then and had to pay a token fine and stop doing it. That's when M$ et al. learned that they had to pony up to the politicians to keep their license to steal.